As if being the only member of the male population in three out of my four classes wasn't enough of a burden, tonight I was graced with the joy of being the only man present while a group of about thirty women decided to see who could do the best man-bashing. And not in the traditional girl-talk way. (If it was, I totally would have been able to gay-talk my way through it. This, dear reader, was new and dangerous territory.) It all started because we're studying human development, and specifically the development of the brain and cognition as it relates to language. And then we started talking about the sex of the baby. And then they* started talking about sex. And then they started talking about how sperm compete to see who's the best and who can reach the egg the fastest, in a "truly male fashion," to use my teacher's terms.

All this talk of straight sex was more than I could handle. And given that I'm brand new in this place, even though I'm openly gay, I'm not exactly in the habit of announcing that fact to a roomful of people I've only seen like five times in my life so far, most of whom I've yet to even talk to. So, feeling somewhat defenseless, and aware of all the eyes that were trained on me throughout the room, I said the only possible thing I could in the situation:

"AWKWARD!"

Which, while it didn't really help, necessarily, to put an end to the conversation, it did distract a number of people and suddenly cause a few of said distracted ones to say "Awww, poor thing." I wonder how many of them suddenly felt bad because they thought I was straight, rather than just basing it on the gender factor (and maybe because I had at least, like, 40 eyes trained on ME when I wasn't the one who asked for the attention). Those who I've talked to on more than one occasion probably weren't as worried, and I'm pretty sure that the girl who was wearing those fabulous red shoes last week was thinking to herself, "Yeah, he's probably totally agreeing with them, but just can't come out and say it right now," and then shaking her head and laughing under her breath. Bitch.

And by the way, the video that we had to watch that even showed the baby being born and then breast-feeding like it was going out of style, was it really necessary to show all that TNA? I get that you were monitoring the brain as the baby was born, but seriously, I don't think waiting until a few minutes after the fact would have made any difference in the data you acquired. I saw way more than I ever wanted to see, blown up on a giant 6'x6' screen, such that that close-up you used for "effect" and "detail" was like 25 times larger than real life. If the end goal of that was to make me even more uncomfortable than I already was, then the goal was aimed way below the mark. It was all I could do to not run screaming from the room.

*You'll notice the pronoun shift to they, which implies that yours truly was not an active part of that particular aspect of class discussion.